I have tried searching various FAQs & posts, but still not sure how to go about this.

I'm impressed by puppy speed I get out of the live CD and would like something like this for day-to-day use on my machine....

I know about the FAT32 MS-DOS style install, but I already have a spare ext3 partition I would like to use, which lives on a logical partition in the extended portion of my hard-disk.

When I tried out the installer script on the Live CD, it asked me a fairly blunt question about whenther I wanted to proceed with an install on my primary IDE drive, "OK" "CANCEL"... it didn't ask me about which partition, or if I wanted to format anything or GRUB.

Seeing as I have (and wish to keep) my XP, KNOPPIX, fat and ext partitions I was not to happy with clicking on "OK", even if the relevent question come later on... I did not want to continue, in case it wiped my other stuff.

Is there a btter installer, or third party tool for doing this?

One other thing I've been wondering about is the possibility of having it running in-RAM, but loading from the hard-disk (rather than from the live CD). Is this possible from an ext3 partition, or will I bee needing MS-DOS to do this?

Thanks & regards,

Mark, the-puppy-newbie

When I use the Universal installer, the first screen lets you choose what kind of device to install to. If you choose "IDE (ATA) internal drive", the next screen will say choose which drive to install to (if you have only one drive you'll have just one choice). Then the next screen should show all the partitions on that drive to choose from. If you're not seeing this something is wrong. (sure it's an IDE drive?)

Later in the installer it will ask you if you want to do a "normal" install or a "coexist" install. The normal install will install the files on you partition just like any other linux distro and will not run in ram and will take the whole partition. The coexist install will just copy three files from the CD to the partition and won't erase anything that's already there. Coexist will boot to ram and run like the CD. I don't remember if the grub installer runs automaticly for the coexist option. If it doesn't you can run the installer from the Control panel. I use a coexist install, here's my grub entry:

title Windows (on /dev/hda1)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

title Puppy 2.10 (on /dev/hda9)
rootnoverify(hd0,8)
kernel (hd0,8)/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 PMEDIA=idehd
initrd (hd0,8)/initrd.gz

The normal install is recomended if your computer has less than 128mb of ram and/or is quite slow.

Hope that helps.

Kirk

Hi Kirkpuppy

Many thanks for your advice I'll give the RAM-enabled option a try and report back.

Perhaps I'm just being paranoid about the outcome of running the installer script However, iirc, it doesn't a hint about whether or not changes are about to be made, and I do get a bit nervy about losing my data elsewhere